Four years ago, Barry Alvarez threw a wide-eyed freshman under center. The stage was huge — a showdown against No. 4 Michigan — and the challenge almost as great — UW found itself in a 21-9 hole.

And Brooks Bollinger performed. He darted all over the Camp Randall turf, his fresh lithe legs proving too much for the suddenly cumbersome Wolverine defenders. He completed huge passes, picked up bigger first downs and provided the Badgers with a spark that, despite the superb running of Ron Dayne, had seemed absent all season.

The QB didn’t win UW the game after replacing Scott Kavanaugh in the second half — Michigan’s 12-point lead proved insurmountable — but Bollinger established himself as a playmaker, a 6-foot-2-inch ball of energy topped with toughness, and the Badgers’ starting quarterback, a position he would not relinquish the rest of his career.

That career proved the most successful in UW history — after topping Minnesota 49-31 Saturday, Bollinger pushed his record to 29-7, better than any previous Wisconsin QB — and yet was often marked by a surprising amount of criticism and questioning when UW faltered the slightest bit.

The quarterback on any team is alternately the hero and the goat, with no middle ground, and Bollinger was no exception. When UW overcame a 17-point deficit to beat Ohio State 42-17 in Bollinger’s first start, a savior was born.

Two years down the road, with Dayne and Rose Bowls a distant memory and victories a bit tougher to come by, fans felt Bollinger lost a bit of his luster. During last year’s 5-7 campaign and this year’s struggle of a Big Ten season, the house nearly came down.

Fans, noticing that Bollinger’s passing totals didn’t quite match up with the Drew Breeses and Kurt Kittners of the league, called for big-armed backup Jim Sorgi. They wanted Bollinger to cease the same free-running heroics that had so endeared him to them a year earlier, and just throw the football.

A wide-open offense, a vertical passing game — that’s fun, they thought; but in wanting a Tim Couch, UW fans failed to realize they already had something more important: a winner.

Bollinger never had Mike Vick’s arm or Brees’ sniper-like accuracy. The last thing anyone would call him is a gunslinger, an arm that happens to have a body attached. Barry Alvarez must have said it a million times in the past four years: “Brooks is a running quarterback.”

A runner, yes — despite not possessing Eric Crouch’s sprinter’s speed or Donovan McNabb’s eye-popping athleticism, he always managed to beat that next guy and get to those sticks — but a quarterback first.

There’s more to playing the toughest position in sports than just throwing touchdown passes. More often than not in college football it’s managing a game, not passing for 300 yards, that brings the wins. And Bollinger could control a game with the best of them.

For Bollinger, the coach’s son, it was the mistakes he didn’t make, not the huge plays he did, that won games for the Badgers for four years. In his four years at UW, Bollinger threw only 16 interceptions in 747 pass attempts. Even though he was running with the ball constantly and taking too many sacks this year (38), Bollinger fumbles were as rare as a snowless Wisconsin winter.

It’s hard to think of an interception or fumble that came when Bollinger was trying to do too much, playing outside of his abilities. Bollinger realized what he was blessed with — stellar feet, a feel for the game and a coach who believed in him in any situation — and took advantage. No matter what the pass-hungry fans said, Bollinger never lost faith in his abilities, and more times than not, it worked out for UW.

The 2002 season was a rough one, by any account. Bollinger himself admits that it wasn’t the team’s, or his, best campaign in his four years at UW. Some games he didn’t pass the ball well, and in others, even his vaunted feet failed him. But winning solves everything, and UW’s victory to take Paul Bunyan’s Axe back from those rival Gophers solved a lot of things for Bollinger.

“I think there’s been so many this year where we’ve been close, when we haven’t played our best or I haven’t played my best,” Bollinger said after the win. “It’s great to finish and leave with a win, go to a bowl game, all that stuff, but more importantly, just to win a football game.”

It seems that’s all Bollinger has known how to do at UW: win. It wasn’t always pretty (see his 5-13, 41-yard performance in last year’s win over Virginia), it hasn’t always been awe-inspiring (he’s never thrown more than three TDs in a game), but it has rarely been disappointing.

And that’s why Bollinger needed to win Saturday. The Camp Randall fans, starving for a home victory after the Badgers had gone 2-9 in their last 11 Big Ten home games, deserved to see the winningest QB in UW history go out that way.

After a terribly disappointing 2002 season, you couldn’t have scripted the ending any better — a win over archrival Minnesota, a final chance to regain the axe and celebrate with it, a bowl berth when it looked like there wasn’t one coming.

“You kind of envision it so much, how you want it to end, and fortunately today it was pretty much exactly how I envisioned it,” Bollinger said. “Everything combined, winning the game, running over to get the axe, being able to celebrate with the Camp Randall fans one more time — it was perfect.”

Perfection. The one thing coaches claim cannot be attained in football. In that last moment of his Big Ten career, though, celebrating and remembering and trying not to look too far ahead, Brooks Bollinger proved them all wrong.